The movie called life

I was out on an evening walk with a friend yesterday when we came across a few parked mini vans. It struck immediately. The filming of a movie was in progress. On the opposite side of the road was a popular actor standing on the pavement and posing for the camera. What was unusual for me was, he was standing still so I initially thought they were taking still photographs, but that was not the case. Then they crossed the road and repeated the same. For the amount of time he stood still for a video shoot required immense patience and perseverance. I am aware of the amount of effort that goes into the making of each movie, be it a short film or a multi-starrer commercial movie, but this was the first time I was experiencing it directly. When I was looking at him, I remembered observing the people who were practicing Tai-Chi in the parks in Shanghai. Someone told me that the more we practice Tai-Chi the slower our body movements should become and it struck me that film making is far more rigorous than what it seems to be.

I have always had a strange allure towards movies from my younger days and I realized the reason only years later. It is about the characters in the movie because I find it very interesting to study and understand people and their behavior. It is said that there are certain number of templates from which we are all created; probably that is why they say there are 8 doppelgangers like each one of us somewhere in the world. But then what is different about us? Personality and behavior, both of which are formed from the circumstances we live in and the experiences we go through. The lives of rich people or beggars on the streets might look the same, but what each one experiences in their daily lives is completely unique. Experiences are what make each one of us uniquely different from the others. This uniqueness is usually what inspires the creation of movies because some of us want to share our own experiences and experiences of others with the world.

Not all genres of movies are made based on human experiences. Some are based on our imagination as well. This has only widened the spectrum of movie making. What we are doing in movies is, we are creating characters that live out their lives on the screen based on how we want them to. This leads me to two questions. 1) Are we being Gods here? 2) Just like how we create characters in movies, what if all of us are characters in a massive multi-lingual movie being scripted by someone and the lives we live are based on how we are being directed? The more I think about this, the more intriguing it becomes. If someone was to make a movie in which all the characters look the same and have similar experiences, wouldn’t it be a boring and disastrous movie? I believe similar is the case with our lives as well, that is why the uniqueness is built into our appearance and our experiences. What makes this thought more interesting is the fact that something in the Universe always resembles something else. The atomic structure at the micro level has the uncanny resemblance to the planetary structure around stars at the macro level so it may not be a coincidence that the movies we make resembles the magnum opus movie called life we are part of and the characters we create are similar to the characters we are.

All of this leads me to the question, is the destiny of each one of us part of that script of life? Doesn’t all of this mean that reel life is an integral part of real life? Only one question perplexes me. If what is in real life comes alive on reel life, will the opposite hold true? Will what we imagine and create in reel life come true in real life? Isn’t this happening already? Our random and obscure imagination about advanced technology, super powers and aliens are all slowly coming true. What is actually happening here? On the infinite canvas called life, aren’t we also contributing towards creating characters which means aren’t each one of us mini Gods?

I am sure everyone who reads this will tell me, the more answers we search for the more questions will arise. Let’s stick to watching movies and enjoying them. Oh well, as is always the case, we will know more when we are ready to know more.